Creatures Caves

A fanfic I have been writeing over at Creaturetopica:

Prologue
Trixy

It was night out. Not in the literal sense as in the artificial environment of the shee ark but the albian idea of a day/night cycle had been kept. The lights had been dimmed so the starlight and the light of the nebula the ship was passing thru at the time could shine. All of this was however completely below notice to Trixy the ettin as she pried a piece of the ark?s control board off with a crowbar. ?Get gadget? she said happily as warning lights flashed all over the ship. <System malfunction> flashed on the screen. ?Eat system malfunction? trixe happily said. <Unable to understand> ?Push dat.? <Course reset. > ?Eat computer.? < Course locked-impact in ten seconds > lit up on the computer screen then went out in a spray of sparks as Trixy pulled it out of the wall and headed off for the ettin room carrying it.

Chapter one
Edward

In the Norn room Edward the Norn woke up as the radio he had been sleeping next to started to blare warnings and all the lights turned red. <Nine seconds to impact> it screeched in his face. This had about the same effects as a bucket of water thrown in his face and he woke and rand for the lift yelling that the ark was going to crash. Needless to say most of the other Norn?s responses where along the lines of ?you had a nightmare, go back to sleep.? Edward responded by grabbing the nearest Norn slapping him awake and forcing his head up so he would see the radio. ?Nowlemme get back to sleep? the Norn groaned and fell over back into dreamland. <Eight seconds to impact> was left unheard as Edward was running for the door to the corridor and the bridge. This was as due to the need to protect the crew in case of an emergency it was one of the safest places on the ship and partly as it would have the best view.

When he got there the computer was down to <Four seconds to impact> and a huge sphere of brown blocked the view out the dome with a blue patch on one side and icecaps. As <Three seconds to impact> blared the ship hit the planet?s atmosphere and everything went crazy. Norns where woken as they where throw from their places of sleep (norns don?t use beds) and sent bouncing of the walls as the falling ship went into a spin. Edward was flipped into the air and slammed into the cheese vender making it spray cheese everywhere and knocking him out. <System failure> said the computer just before Edward went tumbling like a piece of clothing in a washing machine in till his foot smashed the screen in a shower of glass and very expensive parts.

When the ship hit, it hit hard scattering parts all over the landscape. The Creatures after some time lost their fear enough to move again.

When he had woken up Edward got up surprised that apart from a cut over his left eye still in one piece- sadly the same could not be said for the Ark. The bridge was now a mess, with monitors lying broken on the floor and shards of glass from the windows scattered all over the place. A cool breeze was blowing in from outside, and there were smells drifting in that reminded Edward of his home in the Norn Terrarium a bit. "The Terrarium!" He yelled, realizing that it must be in a terrible state as well.

Running down the ship?s main hall he hit the button to open the door and gasped. The corridor to the lift had fallen in and a mix of critters, knocked out or worse norns and bits of the room?s supports lay scattered about. The remaining lights where red and the whole room was dusted with broken glass from the dome. Norns started to get up and wander about. ?Now do you believe me?? asked Edward. ?Well, yes.? said the Norn he had shook awake looking angrily at Edward like the whole thing was his fault. Edward gulped, this was Gus, the aggressive and stupid Beowulf Norn who was often and not without reason called ?the terror of the Norn terrarium? but only behind his back. If Edward had known who he had been he would never had shook him awake. Gus turned, furry in his eyes and looked at Edward who ran away.

He was passing the aquarium terrarium?s door (which was leaking water around the sides and making a groaning noise) when Edward realized Gus was not fallowing him. Rather Gus and many of the other norns had stopped at the door to the ettin terrarium. Apart from the gadget piles, which had been sprayed about the room, it looked normal. That was of coarse until you saw the left end of the room. Where the volcano had once been a jagged ring of crumpled metal and bioengineered hull and in the center of it a hole leading outside to the planet. A plant the size of one of the trees in the Norn terrarium but shaped like a raindrop with long multiple trunks supporting it loomed the torn-off wreckage of the volcano hanging from it?s top. In the distance a forest of trees that looked like thin pumperspikel?s with scaly looking bark and spikes spread out over a hill and tiny reddish pink animals the size of robins buzzed about like bees. The norns stared.

Chapter two
Susan

For Susan the Bengal Norn it had not been a good day. Instead of wakening to a breakfast of tasty ark carrots and shee cheese she had been shook awake when the Norn terrarium had hit and was being babbled at that the ark had crashed. She knew this had not happened, as the autopilot was there to stop such things so she rose from the wreckage and wandered off to find out why the terrarium looked like a bomb had hit it. She thought it most likely had to do with those pesky grendels.

Chapter three
Gus

Stepping out of the hole in the ettin terrarium Gus looked at the sky. Unlike that he had seen from the ark, which had been black with stars it was blue and two suns shone high in it. The robin sized alien flyers he had seen out the hole buzzed around him. All this was secondary in his mind however to the need to find someone to blame for the ark crashing. He heard a pinging sound from behind the ark?s crashed bulk and headed off to see what it was. All he saw was a blackish blur with red lights glowing before from his point of view everything seemed vanish into a jolt of pain in the region of his ribs. In the Norn terrarium?s crypt the gadget beeped and logged that a Norn had died.

Chapter four
Susan

Susan stepped out of the Norn terrarium door and headed down the corridor. Norns where everywhere running about the ship. Ignoring them she headed for the bridge. What she saw stopped her in her tracks. The dome had shattered and above it rather then the black of space was blue sky. Something shot past overhead emitting a roar like that of the hover platforms motors and a pinging sound. It seemed that the ark had crashed. She looked around then stepped out a hole in the broken dome onto alien soil. First stepping carefully then running Susan started to explore the crash site. In the distance a grove of trees, each the size of a large pumperspikel but so thin around that a Norn could have circled one with its arms but for the spikes grew. Closer, plants shaped like raindrops mounted on multiple thin tentacle-like sticks where scattered about the landscape. She pushed one and it sprayed tiny seeds at her from a hole in its bottom. Susan ate one and decided it was rather tasty, somewhat but not entirely unlike a pumperspikel.

Chapter five
Edward

Plucking up his courage Edward stepped out of the ship and stared. A flying animal the size of a robin but wingless and buzzing like a bee or dragonfly went humming past and landed on a dead meek killed in the crash. Edward picked it up and stared at it. It was a pinkish, reddish color and eyeless. Four little holes, two in the back and two in the front blew air back at him. Four rocklice like legs wiggled at him and a tiny tentacle tipped with a mouth wiggled at the front. More of the things buzzed about landing on the dead meek, sticking their tiny tentacle-mouths in it and sucking. The one in Edward?s paw pushed its way out and spraying a stream of smoke from the holes in it?s back took off. He watched as it buzzed into the forest and something with a single rocklicelike limb shot out and speared it. A strange pinging sound echoed from behind the side of the ship. He wandered over to it and stopped in amazement. It was an animal but unlike anything he had ever seen on the ark or in the videos of old Albia in the Lerner. It was huge, bigger then a hut, and had two legs. Unlike the legs on any ark animal it?s legs where positioned one in front of the other and jointed strangely. As in the small rooms of the shee ark there was on room for running animals Edward had never seen a deer but if he had he would have seen the similarity of the jointing. Two nostrils on it?s back puffed and tiny, glowing, light-blue spots shone. It?s head looked like the skull of a grazer with a tongue ending in a mouth like that of the jetting creatures had in place of a lower jaw. Two post-like rods of flesh stuck out of its shoulders twitching to keep it balanced. With a swish of it?s tongue it bit a chunk out of one of the plants and swallowed. All this time as Edward watched it had kept pinging. ?Wow? he said.

Chapter six
Gaia

Gaia or as she was technically known Genetic Ark Interface Apparatus shook off a last piece of the delicate life-support compound with a beam of telekinetic force. It wasn?t like they could be repaired anyway. Or would be needed, considering that according to the ship?s few remaining scanners they had crashed on a planet. ?Darn that Trixy? Gaia muttered as she grabbed a broken pipe hanging from the ceiling in her steel beak and pulled herself out of the rubble. Swinging herself along, slamming holes in the ceiling with her beak and pulling over to them to make the next one and move on she headed to the Norn terrarium. About five minuets and fifty-two holes later she reached the door. After the punishment of a few swings it fell in and was swiftly fallowed by Gaia. After pulling herself to the button to summon it she called the hover platform and perched on it. With a burst of telekinesis she opened it?s hull and began to rewire. A minuet later the hover platform crashed out of the already broken dome and shot into the alien sky? with Gaia welded to it and her circuits controlling all its functions.

Chapter seven
Gaia

Rocketing above the shipwreck, reaching a height of nearly two miles Gaia was having the time of her life. This was when she heard the pinging. A radar sweep revealed two flying animals, each nearly three times the size of one of the norn?s huts where heading straight at her. They had black, scaly skin with glowing parches of an extremely pale purple-blue-white on their tails and a huge horn protruding from their foreheads. They didn?t flap their wings, rather billows of smoke shot from four holes in the back of the wings each behind a pod-shaped bulge in the wing jetting them forward. They where still getting bigger and Gaia felt a twitch of fear. Shouldn?t they have moved so that they wouldn?t hit her by now after all?

P.S. It's not nearly done yet